Standing in a corridor outside Arizona’s lockerroom late Wednesday night, Sean Miller had reason to feel good. His team had just executed well down the stretch, won a tight road game and improved to 3-0 in conference play.

Then Miller stepped away from the TV cameras and was asked about the state of Pac-12 basketball — not the most uplifting topic, for sure, but an important one.

In the Hotline’s view, Miller is as authoritative on the issue as anyone:

* He’s in charge of one of the two Pac-12 programs with true national reach and resonance.

* He played and coached in conferences where basketball is king (the Big East and Atlantic 10).

* He has a unique history with the Pac-12.

Because of the Ed Rush affair (i.e., ‘BountyGate’) in 2013, Miller had every reason to take an indifferent approach to Pac-12 policy and success.

He could have spent the past five-plus seasons focused only on himself and Arizona and not cared a lick about the conference at large.

Instead, Miller has been all-in for years, working behind the scenes with conference officials to develop strategies for improving the collective.

From this vantage point, Miller’s high-road approach and high-level involvement give him significant credibility when it comes to the Pac-12 product, initiatives and the approach to scheduling, which is vitally important to success on Selection Sunday.

(Related to what’s below but not addressed specifically by Miller: Pac-12 officials, athletic directors and head coaches continue to discuss whether to move to a 20-game conference schedule.)

Before he headed for the team bus, Miller spent a few minutes on the larger picture.

On the state of Pac-12 basketball:

“The one thing I really feel is that right now, I’m not part of the solution.” (Meaning: The Wildcats aren’t playing up to his standards.)

“Arizona and UCLA have always carried the torch. If you look at every conference, whether it’s men’s basketball or college football, there are always the ones that carry the torch — (schools) that have been great for decades.

“Us being the best we can be, and the healthiest we can be, is really key towards the success of our conference.”

On support from the conference office:

“(Deputy commissioner) Jamie Zaninovich, from the second he joined our conference (in 2014), has given us his heart and soul.

“He has a basketball mind because he’s been on the selection committee, and he cares, and he’s throwing ideas off of all us and trying to implement things that will help us in the future.”

On the Pac-12’s poor non-conference performance:

“At the end of the day, November and December are the two biggest months in college basketball.

“People can roll their eyes, but that’s the truth. And how you schedule, how many games you win, and who you beat — right now, it doesn’t matter:

“If we’re a conference that beats each other up, but we start with so many wins, then it’s like, ‘They’re good from top to bottom.’

“But if you struggle in the months of November and December and you beat each other up, then it becomes, ‘Nobody’s any good.’

“And that’s not fair from this perspective: There are always those teams that really hit their stride in January and February.

“I go back to when I played in the Big East in the 80s. If you catch a PJ Carlesimo (Seton Hall) team in late February or early March, they could beat anybody. If you judge them on playing St. Peter’s or the early games in November, maybe they weren’t as good.

“That’s kind of been taken away from all of us, and I think about how spread out we are in the west. It’s not as easy for all of us to schedule accordingly and appropriately.

“That’s something that Jamie has really helped us with. I can only tell you how I feel, and that’s that he has given us everything, and hopefully, we can rally.”

Two years ago, the conference put three teams in the Sweet 16 (Arizona, Oregon and UCLA) and one in the Final Four (Oregon). On the potential for a quick fix:

“The other thing that’s important — and I’ll go to my Atlantic 10 days — is that you talk about the torch-bearers and those who carry, but how bad are your bottom teams?

“I’ll give you that year (2017). That was, for us as coaches, probably one of the more frustrating years, only because of this: We were so good with three teams.

“Any of the three could of — and Oregon got to the Final Four. But remember, we only got four in (the NCAAs).

“So when you have a top that good — and you have NBA players all over the place — and to get only that fourth team (USC) in, that’s when you take a step back and say, probably because whoever finished at the bottom, it was kind of like they pull you down.

“For us, we have great cooperation among our coaches, and hopefully, we can turn it around.

“Sometimes it’s like, ‘Hey, we’re fine.’ But none of us, as coaches, feels that we’re fine. We’ve got to do better. We can turn it back around.”

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Jon Wilner has been covering college sports for decades and is an AP top-25 football and basketball voter as well as a Heisman Trophy voter. He was named Beat Writer of the Year in 2013 by the Football Writers Association of America for his coverage of the Pac-12, won first place for feature writing in 2016 in the Associated Press Sports Editors writing contest and is a five-time APSE honoree.

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